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It is with some nervousness that I attempt to share news of the release of hardcore flight sim DCS: A-10C Warthog. It sounds and looks like a pretty remarkable achievement, but as I tend to start weeping uncontrollably if you put me on anything more complex than Crimson Skies or Stunt Island I may not be best placed to successfully identify the major lures of this beast. That said, it does include a ‘game’ mode as an alternative to exacting simmery, so perhaps I’d not be completely out of my depth.

Like its predecessor Black Shark, this focuses primarily on a single sky-car – the titular wild pig, a US close air support attack aircraft. Devs Eagle Dynamics tout it as “The most realistic flight dynamics ever done for a PC simulation”, and if there’s anyone who knows about dynamics clearly it’s them.

It’s on sale for $60 now, as a digital exclusive. A high price for sure, but I get the sense they’ve crammed an awful lot into this. Buy it or read an eyewatering amount of Warthog detail here.

Here’s a fan-made trailer, based on clips from the long-running beta. Very much demostrates that this is SERIOUS BUSINESS.

Here too is in-game footage from the initial training missions. This is purely how to start the Warthog up – a process so impressively in-depth that it requires no less than two videos. Hold me. I’m scared.

56 Comments

Man do I buy this or not. Going to buy Il2 Cliffs Of Dover but this looks so good. And more importantly will I have time to play it with Crysis 2, Homefront, Shogun 2 and Portal 2 all already pre-ordered.

If you can afford to, buy both. It’s a bit of a niche genre these days, and those of us with a love for pretending to drive flying machines should try to support the little industry as much as possible.

This year I have to make a 3D game as part of a uni assignment. I decided with a futuristic flight sim game where you play as a drop shop pilot. What I cannot gauge is whether any flight sim enthusiasts would enjoy flying a made up aircraft. What do you guys think?

Some might, but the problem with a lot of simmers is that they get very precious about their titles being ‘sims’ and not ‘games’. Thus anything that’s not ultra-realistic gets screamed down as a ‘game’. Not all of them, by a long chalk, are like this, but those who are are probably the most vociferous, skewing any appreciation as to their actual proportion of simmers.
I posted this recently at SimHQ: I always suspect this comes down to grown men feeling a bit silly about the concept of playing video games. Much more ‘manly’ to claim we are piloting simulations! Except we’re not; we are playing games, you daft sods.

This sim gives me the cold shivers … in a good way, if that is even possible. I have been playing the beta on and off for a few months and all I’ve managed to accomplish is take off and land. That’s not to scare anyone else away, but the sim is so damn deep that I am afraid to take my little piggy anywhere near the enemy for fear of having her shot out from under me before I get the chance to land this complex beast. The manual is heavy (size and complexity) but there are a number of checklists, YouTube videos and in-game tutorials to get past a lot of this learning curve. You have to invest time in it and you _have_ to have flight hardware (joystick, throttle, pedals).

I look forward to IL-2: Cliffs of Dover as well. This genre is vastly under represented and is close to being a vanishing breed (hardcore sims). It’s is too easy (?) for companies to make a quicker buck hitting the easier targets instead of investing the time and effort to produce something this big.

Games/simulations like this are intended to have your most critical controls mapped to your HOTAS system — your joystick and throttle controller buttons and switches. You don’t want to take your hands off the primary flight controls. Less critical controls are usually mapped to the keyboard, although some things like setting radio frequencies might require mouse interaction, I dunno.

Maintaining situational awareness is done via head-tracker like TrackIR, so you can glance down briefly at the instruments, and keep your visual lock on ground targets and threats. I haven’t played the beta or anything, that’s just how sims like this are usually “meant” to be played.

I’m not sure if it can be done, but if it helps, I can tell you that when temporarily stickless I mapped a 360 controller for IL2. It was nearly impossible to fly well and quite frustrating. So bear this in mind if you want to give it a go with Warthog – if you get frustrated, it might well be the controller’s fault.

The learning curve can’t be worse than Rise of Flight either (WW1 sim), where you have just a very small number of controls to worry about, but everything is always close to the edge of failure in those fragile kites: “I’m in a dive… but wait… is my radiator at the right setting? Watch those RPMs! Crap, there goes the engine!”.

I consider myself to be a flight sim guy but this is going overboard. The theoretical market for this kind of software is what, a few hundred thousand people worldwide? The flight sims kill themselves :(

What I want from a flight sim:
– Shooting. Civilian pilot wannabees can go and fly that Microsoft sim.
– A flight model that feels realistic. It does not have to be 100% real but it has to feel right. There’s no seat-of-the-pants feeling anyway when you’re sitting at a computer so absolutely 100% correct flight modeling would not feel any more real than something that cuts a few corners. Example: Venus Patrol. It feels quite good and way better than most airplane games released in recent years.
– Abstraction for aircraft systems. I don’t want to check oxygen level gauge operation. I don’t want to switch battery power on. I want to start the engines, get “go” from radio and push throttle to afterburner. If that would blow up the plane in real life the game can offer some stability control and raise the throttle slower. Also: weapons and radar systems need abstraction. Shooting with those things takes A LOT of studying in real life. I want to fly to the target, find in on radar and shoot a missile.
– Take-offs and landings! And then I need autopilot and time compression to get to the fun part without sitting as a statue for an hour.
– Dynamic world, campaign, fun missions: Add Enemy Engaged series and Apache Assault to the blender and mix.
– Dogfights.
– Humanly understandable learning curve. If I want to cook my head off I can do that between 8.00-16.00 during weekdays, thank you.

In short: I want the turn-of-the-millennium flight sims which I played as a kid: F-15 Strike Eagle 2, F-117, Enemy Engaged, Gunship 2000, Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat… All those but with 2011 graphics and all the other stuff they can do nowadays!

Exactly my thoughts. I don’t mind all this complexity being in there, if there’s a knob to tune it down, or turn it off. In fact, it’s better that it’s in there than if it isn’t, because that means good things for the overall realism. But while it might be interesting to go through the fully real startup procedure once, I wouldn’t want to have to do that every time.

Even the old grandfather king of sims, Falcon (3? 4?) had an instant action mode where you could start up in the air with things to shoot at.

I’m not at all interested in playing a 3rd person, behind-the plane, arcade flyer where you can’t stall, you have unlimited missiles, and if you die you respawn a few seconds later. On the other hand, I don’t want to have to remember to turn off the APU as step 27 of the engine startup procedure every time I go flying.

Those three levers below the HUD… am I right in assuming they’re to jettison the Engines and APU selectively in case one of them catches fire? If so, that’s incredibly metal. It’s like a salamander shedding it’s tail. A salamander with a 30mm death hose.

Oh man, that’s one well-made trailer. I’m not even into flight sims and it makes me want to play one. Amazing shots with an amazing soundtrack. The fact that it’s community made just makes it that more impressive.

I live out in the middle of Kansas. We’ve got a runway here, close enough to the local bombing range that the A-10s and F/A-18s park here when they’re not practicing. Every other year, we have an open-house with a bunch of aircraft flying over and occasionally strafing targets on the ground. Last year, the A-10s got to fly an entire simulated training exercise, complete with dummy missiles being fired at them, four strafing runs and several dummy bombs dropped on them. Seeing those birds on an attack run is something to behold… and it’ll be nice to get inside the cockpit.

This is the next “Falcon 4″ – it’s probably going to be one of the best, if not the best, flight sim made thus far.

I have been hesitating from buying it, just because i’m poor. One of these days i’m just going to make a snap decision and place my order. All they need to do is offer it on Steam and it makes my decision even easier.

Also, also! This guys have been doing sims since forever, and their roster includes actual former US and Russian military personnel, and Russian mathematicians who can levitate on thought. Also, parts of the sim are shared with an actual USAF training sim this same guys developed for, well, the USAF.
Also, you can use multiple monitors with it, I’m using a second touchscreen monitor so I CAN TOUCH THE BUTTONS ON THE SCREEN AND THEY WORK.
Also the community is awesome.
Also it looks incredibly good, it has HDR for instance so looking into the sun HURTS YOUR EYES.

I’ve been enamored of this game since it went into public beta. In my not-so-humble opinion it is the A-10 sim that can finally take the crown of “greatest A-10 game ever” from Parsoft’s venerable A-10: Attack! and A-10: Cuba.

All of the cockpit elements are clickable, and I wrote a piece of software that lets you integrate the radios in the game to Teamspeak 3, so it emulates the real VHF/UHF radios of the A-10. Check it out at link to excessiveheadspace.com and let me know what you think. A-10 is made of win. No lie.

Very impressive trailer ! Now I want to buy the game even if I perfectly know I don’t have the time nor the patience to learn such a complex sim.
At least it’s nice to know some people are really pushing the enveloppe in realism and graphics on the PC!
A-10C Warthog looks like the new benchmark of performance on a PC, what else come close?

The first question in one of the stickied threads on the DCS forum for this is about the bezel dimensions of the MFDs – I may be out of my depth on this one, but I’m still fascinated. Looks like I’ll need a decent joystick to do it justice, so I’ll probably buy it when I upgrade to something a little better than my Xbox controller.